The Bell Curve

[_Analytics]

Analytics,

thanks for reading the book summary from Murray's cousin. A serious error was made, and it was overlooked to note that there was only one kind of tree in the forest, since as I'd mentioned earlier, my issues with the book were long before racial considerations. It actually doesn't make a difference to my argument but it is an unnecessary complication that gets in the way of communicating my point. Your recasting with saplings is certainly fair, and I should have gone that route in the beginning; I actually did not quite intend it to read the way it did when I checked in this morning. So here is the updated version of that last post with alterations colored:

Analytics wrote:
only that low IQ is at rhe root.


Analytics wrote:
His fear going forward is that even if everyone's IQ significantly rises, society is only going to have a good place for those in the top x%.

To me these statements are incompatible, and may even get to the root of what I've been trying to say in many of my posts in regards to what bugs me about the book.

the analogy..

As I understand it, in forests, trees compete for sunlight. Whether the average tree is forty feet tall or two hundred feet tall, the trees at some standard deviation(s) below mean will get so little light that they are at greater risk for disease and death. Perhaps trees are predisposed for the height they have as some believe or as others believe, we could send gardeners to fertilize some of the smaller trees to give them a better chance, and perhaps they will grow taller, but as they do, they will crowd out trees that were nearly their peers in height that we didn't fertilize. If we fertilize all trees, it doesn't matter because it's the same problem but twenty feet higher in the air. Well, nature has its way of optimizing across millions of trees and thousands of forests, and perhaps generally, the loss of trees within the lower tail isn't too bad.

In this analogy we are interested in a particular forest called the Darkening Forest, and many more trees within this forest begin to die than we expect. Note there is only one kind of tree in this forest. We're worried, and so we send Murray's cousin to the scene who is a botanist. He brings all his gear and studies the trees and and then writes a book that he summarizes below.

Book Summary:

I arrived at the Darkening Forest several weeks ago with my knife, a microscope, a calculator and a spade, and I have carefully studied a fair sample of the trees of this forest. Oh, how beautiful they are, every single one. I do hope we can find a solution for this growing tragedy, but I warn you, what I've discovered I'm afraid to say is quite shocking, and it's going to take real bravery to speak about these issues openly and fairly.

Critical to understanding my findings is familiarizing ourselves with the notion of HighQ. Every tree has a HighQ, and this is discovered by, first, cutting into a branch and observing the cells and taking a good look at a certain innate property. With several trees measured in such a fashion, we at last, find the average measure and normalize that to the value 100. The average tree, then, has a HighQ of 100. Most trees find themselves within the vicinity of a HighQ of 100, which is depicted by the middle hump of a bell curve that represents a normal distribution. HighQ is important in that it represents a trees ability to access sunlight, which is needed for it to grow. A tree with a high HighQ is a tree we expect to drink gobs of sunlight and rise toward the clouds stout and true.

Now, here's where our tale gets shocking. As I measured these trees, I found that most of the trees within the Darkening Forest that are dying have low HighQs. How bad is it? Brace yourselves, because you may not wish to accept it. I measured dozens upon dozens of trees with HighQs a full standard deviation below the mean! I wouldn't have believed it myself if I didn't read the tick from the tape with my own eyes. I recall looking at one tree in particular that really struck a chord within me. I liked this tree and wished to save it. Could it be helped? Well, whatever our plans for that tree, just bear in mind that it's HighQ was only 80. Seriously folks, how can you save a tree with an 80 HighQ?

And so my book concludes that tragically, the root cause of the deaths of trees within the Darkening Forest is low HighQ. There are just too many trees below average, unfortunately; no wonder the whole things going to pot.

I think you pretty-much nailed it. When you take out the race thing and recognize that there will necessarily be a hierarchy of winners and losers, the only thing the book really says is that the world has changed so that IQ predicts the winners, and that there will be some interesting dynamics as this new reality sets in.

[_Gadianton]

"only that low IQ is at the root." <-- not the root.

" .... world has changed" <-- this is the root.

But as to your first statement, I sympathize, because plenty of statements you've cited from Murray he is in fact saying low IQ is the root. see the statement about the mothers with IQ 80 that we "can't expect much from". But if the forest darkens further, the zero-sum element ensures that "raising IQ universally would still only find a place for top IQs", only the top is more selective now. By his reasoning about the low-IQ mothers, in the future, we should say of the IQ 125 engineer, "how can we expect much from an engineer whose IQ is only 125?" As soon as we recognize the root cause is the darkening world, then the task is to understand why it's darkening, and whatever policy saves the 125 engineers will save the mothers at 80.

[_Physics Guy]

What these statistical models are trying to do is come up with a model that is useful for either explaining the world around us or making predictions. That's all. Different models could be useful, insightful (or misleading) in different ways. But none of them are the literal underlying truth. As Covey would say, "The map is not the terrain."

That's all nice to say, because it seems to let you duck a lot of tedious epistemological questions, but what does it actually mean? What exactly are you really doing differently, because your thing is "only a useful model", from what you would be doing if you thought it was real?

The old line about maps and territories is actually a good analogy because it shows the pointlessness of this point. Who the heck actually confuses a map with the terrain? Nobody. The only usefulness of a map, though, is in accurately representing the real landscape. If the map is a large-scale one that doesn't show every little dirt track, or if it's an old map that doesn't show new construction, that's one thing. If you're trying to hike the Adirondacks with a map of Candyland, heading for a cabin that's really just a squashed bug on your map, that's another.

Scientific models are useful insofar as they accurately represent something real. Looking for useful models isn't something that scientists do instead of trying to find the real truth. It's the way we go about trying to find the real truth.

[_Analytics]

What these statistical models are trying to do is come up with a model that is useful for either explaining the world around us or making predictions. That's all. Different models could be useful, insightful (or misleading) in different ways. But none of them are the literal underlying truth. As Covey would say, "The map is not the terrain."

That's all nice to say, because it seems to let you duck a lot of tedious epistemological questions, but what does it actually mean? What exactly are you really doing differently, because your thing is "only a useful model", from what you would be doing if you thought it was real?

The old line about maps and territories is actually a good analogy because it shows the pointlessness of this point. Who the heck actually confuses a map with the terrain? Nobody. The only usefulness of a map, though, is in accurately representing the real landscape. If the map is a large-scale one that doesn't show every little dirt track, or if it's an old map that doesn't show new construction, that's one thing. If you're trying to hike the Adirondacks with a map of Candyland, heading for a cabin that's really just a squashed bug on your map, that's another.

Scientific models are useful insofar as they accurately represent something real. Looking for useful models isn't something that scientists do instead of trying to find the real truth. It's the way we go about trying to find the real truth.

Your attitude reminds me of what Ernest Rutherford said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

I can assure you that data scientists do in fact spend their days looking for models that are useful at predicting. You can claim that these guys aren't real scientists, but that doesn't change what it is they do.

The fundamental problem is that when you are dealing with complex systems, the literal "truth" just isn't obtainable--it is burried in the complexity. The best we can hope for are models that provide a bit of insight into the fuzzy patterns that emerge out of the complexity.

[_EAllusion]

EAllusion, your last post does raise a question. If you are an advisor to an elite athlete trying to get into college, passing either the ACT or the SAT will get your man through the door. So which test do you advise him to take? If your man is weak in science, why not avoid the whole issue by taking the SAT instead?

According to one source:

Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching or practice. SAT preparation courses appear to work, but the gains are small — on average, no more than about 20 points per section.

If that is true, cramming for the ACT might be the better choice.

It's probably not a good choice to "cram" at all. If you want to keep the analogy to basketball up, we wouldn't expect William Gates to be one of the top 100 basketball players in the country after speed-studying the game for several weeks. We wouldn't even expect that from a year of sustained practice.

I'm reminded of another film about the late 80's early 90's obsession with the "inner city" that came out a few years prior to Hoop Dreams: Stand and Deliver. It's a film based on a true story where a large number of students from a largely poor and latino high school end up taking the AP calc AB exam with a high pass rate. This was unbelievable at the time and contributed to them being forced to retake the exam on short notice, leading to similar passing scores. Of the 14 asked to retake the test, 2 declined saying they did not need the credit, and other 12 passed again. 18 students in total passed the first time.

From there, the program only continued to grow. By the time the movie was in theaters, over 70 students the previous year had passed the AP calc exam with 12 passing the BC test.

At one point, this single high school had over a quarter of all Mexican-American students who passed the AP calc exam in the country. The AP calc exam is tougher than the SAT, ACT, or (I presume) the ASVAB. I took the BC test in high school in the late 90's and it was a very hard test. No actual college course math test I've ever taken had the same difficulty level. The ACT was comparatively a joke. I'm certain high performance in the AP calc test would predict high performance on easier aptitude test equivalents. And since we are converting IQ from those scores, killing the math section alone would allow them to have high IQ equivalents.

This development only occurred under the leadership of a high school math teacher named Jaime Escalante. Did the school coincidentally have a concentration of high IQ poor Latinos relative to the country? Did a bunch of high IQ Latinos move to this one high school in the country after the program took off? Almost certainly not. I don't think there's any question that the quality of the schooling is what explains the difference in this case.

Here's an interesting tidbit, though. The movie's writing, to elevate the drama, has Jamie Escalante take over a class and transform it into stellar performance through sheer force of this personality and methods within the course of a year. It essentially shows the students go from little math knowledge to passing the AP calc exam in a matter of months. That is not what happened in reality.

I'll quote this article from Reason:

Most of us, educators included, learned what we know of Escalante's experience from Stand and Deliver. For more than a decade it has been a staple in high school classes, college education classes, and faculty workshops. Unfortunately, too many students and teachers learned the wrong lesson from the movie.

Escalante tells me the film was 90 percent truth and 10 percent drama -- but what a difference 10 percent can make. Stand and Deliver shows a group of poorly prepared, undisciplined young people who were initially struggling with fractions yet managed to move from basic math to calculus in just a year. The reality was far different. It took 10 years to bring Escalante's program to peak success. He didn't even teach his first calculus course until he had been at Garfield for several years. His basic math students from his early years were not the same students who later passed the A.P. calculus test.

Escalante says he was so discouraged by his students' poor preparation that after only two hours in class he called his former employer, the Burroughs Corporation, and asked for his old job back. He decided not to return to the computer factory after he found a dozen basic math students who were willing to take algebra and was able to make arrangements with the principal and counselors to accommodate them.

Escalante's situation improved as time went by, but it was not until his fifth year at Garfield that he tried to teach calculus. Although he felt his students were not adequately prepared, he decided to teach the class anyway in the hope that the existence of an A.P. calculus course would create the leverage necessary to improve lower-level math classes.

His plan worked. He and a handpicked teacher, Ben Jimenez, taught the feeder courses. In 1979 he had only five calculus students, two of whom passed the A.P. test. (Escalante had to do some bureaucratic sleight of hand to be allowed to teach such a tiny class.) The second year, he had nine calculus students, seven of whom passed the test. A year later, 15 students took the class, and all but one passed. The year after that, 1982, was the year of the events depicted in Stand and Deliver.

The Stand and Deliver message, that the touch of a master could bring unmotivated students from arithmetic to calculus in a single year, was preached in schools throughout the nation. While the film did a great service to education by showing what students from disadvantaged backgrounds can achieve in demanding classes, the Hollywood fiction had at least one negative side effect. By showing students moving from fractions to calculus in a single year, it gave the false impression that students can neglect their studies for several years and then be redeemed by a few months of hard work.

This Hollywood message had a pernicious effect on teacher training. The lessons of Escalante's patience and hard work in building his program, especially his attention to the classes that fed into calculus, were largely ignored in the faculty workshops and college education classes that routinely showed Stand and Deliver to their students. To the pedagogues, how Escalante succeeded mattered less than the mere fact that he succeeded. They were happy to cheer Escalante the icon; they were less interested in learning from Escalante the teacher. They were like physicians getting excited about a colleague who can cure cancer without wanting to know how to replicate the cure.

http://reason.com/archives/2002/07/01/s ... evisited/1

It turns out what happened that allowed for such a stand-out performance was years of enriched mathematical education, which builds on itself, leading into the final high-end classes. The number of students passing the exam started out low and increased year over year. It wasn't a few weeks of cramming that led to this. It wasn't even a year of cramming. It was improved education starting at the middle school level on up with a gradual improvement occurring year over year as the system took over.

[_honorentheos]

Which brings in race and IQ since it seems that is why we're talking about The Bell Curve instead of some other book.

We are talking about this book because Sam Harris happens to think Charles Murray is a reasonable scholar who is the victim of the PC Police, and EAllusion thinks this proves Sam Harris is a racist hack because Charles Murray being a racist hack is beyond dispute.

If it weren't for EAllusion and Sam Harris having such polar opposite reactions to the Bell Curve and my desire to judge the book for myself, this thread wouldn't exist. It's not the kind of think I'd normally choose to read.

I don't think this does justice to the background for the discussion. It seems to me we're discussing this because Charles Murray is broadly seen as a controversial figure. When he was disruptively protested at Middlebury College last year, Sam Harris became interested in the controversy around him which brought him to read the book The Bell Curve and then invite Murray onto his podcast. Outcry ensued over his apparent endorsement of Murray, and Harris in typical form took on the outcry with relish. EA isn't an individual with a unique perspective on flaws in Murray's position but seems to accurately represent a broader view of The Bell Curve, one that Harris and Murray had spent time deriding extensively in the Waking Up podcast. So, it seems we're engaging in an extension of a much broader discussion that isn't fairly isolated to EA or Sam Harris. And by extension, we are having this discussion because Murray includes controversial conclusions regarding race and IQ in his findings. So. We're talking about this because of race and IQ.

To take a step back, Analytics, in an up thread comment you seemed to share the view that race is primarily a construct rather than something that can be objectively defined and is widely accepted as such among social scientists. Do you sincerely believe this to be the case?

Second, we discussed the idea that IQ, meaning IQ and not g, is controversial as to what it is actually measuring. So while one can argue that Murray views it a certain way, the discussion seems to require caveats to explain his presuppositions and how others may hold valid contradictory views that need to be accounted for if one wants to extend past claims into asserting policy making should start from a place Murray defines. Would you agree with that?

I believe an "African American" can be objectively defined as an American with darker skin and some relatively recent African ancestory. However, I don't think there is anything intrinsically significant about that in a Linnaean sense--it isn't like different races are biologically different sub-species or something. Sure, a dna test from ancestory.com might say somebody is 38% African, but that is just based on some bits of dna that are correlated with other people who identify as having African ancestory.

...Whatever Murray's personal views are, he pretty-much keeps them to himself (that is what upsets people--they think he is implying things that he doesn't actually state). Murray says he is just trying to describe the sum-total of the evidence. He does talk about how different studies are better than others, and describes a range of views. He'll offer a vague opinion on which views are better supported by the evidence, and of course says that more study is needed on most topics (I say "most" because he does say, for example, we don't need more research on whether attending Head Start increases your IQ. He says that particular question has been studied to death and doesn't require more research to confidently answer). But it isn't like he is an evanglisit for the true interpretation of IQ. So all of the caveats and contradictory views do seem to be more-or-less included in what he says.

Based just on your explanations in this thread and a skimming of key chapters in the book, it doesn't seem like Murray is trying to maintain clear lines between what is defensible and what is speculative.

[_honorentheos]

It turns out what happened that allowed for such a stand-out performance was years of enriched mathematical education, which builds on itself, leading into the final high-end classes. The number of students passing the exam started out low and increased year over year. It wasn't a few weeks of cramming that led to this. It wasn't even a year of cramming. It was improved education starting at the middle school level on up with a gradual improvement occurring year over year as the system took over.

I was thinking earlier today that Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, as well as a few episodes of his Revisionist History podcast, would be a good way for someone to round out their thinking on Murray.

There's a section in Outliers where Gladwell points to the expanding spread of test scores between largely low-income students and schools compared to middle-class and high income students and schools. The results showing that average test scores among early grades were comparable for all socio-economic backgrounds, but that differences begin to appear after the first summer break. Kids from more affluent backgrounds would return to school and test at or above the level of the previous spring while kids of low income backgrounds would test at or lower. The difference maker appearing to be how a kid spent their summer mattered, and kids from more affluent backgrounds had access to parents and resources that maintained or increased their learning while kids from less affluent backgrounds started to be left behind. This effect becomes more and more pronounced year to year and, as one can imagine, has dramatic effects on their freedom of choice when they are preparing to leave secondary education behind (if they make it to graduation) and on to future successes.

Part of the issue I see with Analytic's portrayal of The Bell Curve is how much even the non-racial claims are contradicted by a wealth of other research showing that success in America is not democratic. Being born into a certain socio-economic background makes a difference when it comes to one's opportunities. A kid born into poverty and a bad neighborhood but with an IQ two standard deviations above can't be said to be on the same ground as the kid born into affluence and a safe, nurturing home environment. Whatever Murray's conclusions stem from, it can't be from examining apples to apples comparisons from cradle to grave. When Murray says things like, "Try to imagine a GOP presidential candidate saying in front of the cameras, "One reason that we still have poverty in the United States is that a lot of poor people are born lazy." You cannot imagine it because that kind of thing cannot be said. And yet this unimaginable statement merely implies that when we know the complete genetic story, it will turn out that the population below the poverty line in the United States has a configuration of the relevant genetic makeup that is significantly different from the configuration of the population above the poverty line. This is not unimaginable. It is almost certainly true." That was before Romney basically did exactly that. Yet I can walk outside right now and watch two different crews of Hispanics working on my neighbors yards on a Sunday morning, working hard, while most of the people in my middle-class suburban neighborhood are recreating or chilling. Lazy by what definition?

There was a NPR story here in Phoenix a month or two back where they interviewed a man who owned a food truck. He was a Dreamer, a person of Mexican birth brought to the US as a kid. He went to school here in the US and was part of the robotics team from Arizona that beat the MIT team in 2004. Here's an article about it, which was also made into a movie much like the Stand and Deliver example.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-02-09/ ... ompetition

Unfortunately for this man, his status as an undocumented immigrant meant he couldn't go to college, wasn't able to capitalize on his innate abilities and the notoriety this kind of success ought to bring to one's resume when seeking college acceptance, and he ended up taking his creativity and ability to do something that society allows him to do. The NPR story included him commenting on the possibility of being deported due to Trump's policies so he was considering options such as moving to Canada.

But as far as the bigger picture of the robotics program that he helped put on the map -

In the news stories and debates involving undocumented students and their families, stories about creative geniuses like this group of high school kids are rare. But Cristian Arcega knows they are out there, many of them aching for an opportunity to do something important.

"I've personally met thousands and thousands of them," he says. "It's not as rare as you'd expect. It's just that the opportunities are so limited…The next time you have some undocumented person washing your car or cleaning your lawn, [realize] they were probably aiming to be in school and would prefer to be studying to be an engineer."

There are now about 10-15 graduating seniors every year in the robotics program at Carl Hayden High School — and typically half of them are women. "We have this joke now," Arcega says. "If you meet a Latina engineer from Arizona in her 20s, ask her what year she graduated from Carl Hayden High School, because odds are that's where she came from."

[_Some Schmo]

I don't think this does justice to the background for the discussion. It seems to me we're discussing this because Charles Murray is broadly seen as a controversial figure. When he was disruptively protested at Middlebury College last year, Sam Harris became interested in the controversy around him which brought him to read the book The Bell Curve and then invite Murray onto his podcast. Outcry ensued over his apparent endorsement of Murray, and Harris in typical form took on the outcry with relish. EA isn't an individual with a unique perspective on flaws in Murray's position but seems to accurately represent a broader view of The Bell Curve, one that Harris and Murray had spent time deriding extensively in the Waking Up podcast. So, it seems we're engaging in an extension of a much broader discussion that isn't fairly isolated to EA or Sam Harris. And by extension, we are having this discussion because Murray includes controversial conclusions regarding race and IQ in his findings. So. We're talking about this because of race and IQ.

I get the sense that Analytics shares my respect for Sam Harris's way of reasoning (and I imagine Analytics doesn't always agree with him either). So if Sam Harris is going to stake his reputation on how he interpreted the book, I think Analytics likely felt it was worth reading to judge for himself who he thought was right.

I think it's entirely possible that the book reads like a racist screed from a particular perspective without the author intending it to be so. The author may not even have been aware of his own biases when he wrote it (imagine that!). However, I haven't read the book personally, don't intend to (because the subject just isn't that interesting to me), so I don't know how it reads (and I admire Analytics desire to know; especially since I'm not willing to extend the same effort). From what's been quoted of the book in this thread, I think I understand both points of view.

All I know from having listened to/read Harris over the years is that if that guy is a racist, everyone on the planet is a racist. Calling Harris a racist is only done with malicious intent. As for Murray, I have no idea.

[Guest]

Gad's tree analogy includes something I think deserves revisiting as well. Hat tip to Gad for coming up with it.

To explore it, I think it's helpful to focus on something Analytics said -

Every tree has a HighQ that can be evaluated when the tree is just a sapling. Common wisdom is that the eventual height of a tree depends upon where it is found in the forrest in terms of wind, terrain, water, etc., but otherwise all trees have the same potential. While these things do matter, the most important predictor of whether a tree will grow to be dominant is the HighQ that is measured when the tree is still a sapling.

Some people say that trees of the species Arboles Brunneis have distinct disadvantages in the Darkening Forrest because their ancestors were brought from another forrest and the shock from that and other enviornmental disadvantages keep reverberating across the centuries.

Since this is a Mormon-related board, I think it's fair to use two examples from Utah to enforce this statement: Using this definition of HighQ, it would by necessity be a measure of where the tree was found in the forest, the soil conditions in which the seed fell and took root, it's species, and the genetic content of the seed. HighQ becomes a way of quantifying all of these factors to make a statement about the probability of a tree growing to a height that allows it to continue to flourish in adulthood. And environment would by far be the most important.

The two examples from Utah include fruit orchards and the distinctive north slope/south slope tree communities anyone who has lived on the Wasatch Front would recognize. And I think both help take this analogy and use it to point out the relationship to IQ where it's measuring more than just some innate biological quality but instead refers to a myriad of background factors and their relationship to a particular set of skills viewed favorably in western culture.

Most people who have spent time looking at the Wasatch Range will be familiar with the distinctive look of the slopes, shown in the photo below:



North facing slopes are dominated by juniper, pine, and fir trees while the south facing slopes are dominated by deciduous species like the native oaks and Quaking Aspen. There are similar characteristics for most of the Rocky Mountains with variations in the actual species but the relationship to exposure and tree species success in a given location are similar. Sun exposure, how long the snow pack sits before melting, soil composition, etc., etc. all matter. It isn't that there aren't juniper seeds that land on the south slopes or oak seeds that land on the north slopes. And there are individual trees that find success on both slopes. But the "common wisdom" factors are the dominant determinant in being able to predict whether or not a tree of a certain type will find success in a given area.

There's a plot twist here, too. Most of the slopes above the major cities along the Wasatch Front were heavily logged and much of the tree material one can see is fairly new growth by forestry standards.

Moving to monocultures - Most of the fruit orchards in Utah are found along the benches of the mountains between Brigham City to Santaquin. Their success in this area extends back to the early pioneers. But this isn't due to the early pioneers being well informed arborculuralists who knew the best places to plant fruit trees but rather the pioneers planted fruit trees everywhere they settled from the Provo Level of Lake Bonneville to the valley floor. The microclimate of the benches allowed the trees planted there to survive and thrive with much less input while those outside of this microclimate zone suffered from the extremes of being grown in the extreme winter cold and summer heat of Utah that makes demands on the relatively poorly suited fruit trees. Left to nature they'd mostly all die off.

Both examples should cause one to ask, "What to make of this idea HighQ could mean anything other than an attempt to measure both environmental and genetic factors to predict how a tree will thrive over the remaining course of its' lifespan?" And conclude this results in a sort of tautological claim regarding success given the things being measure are the factors that influence the compounded result? Our HighQ example isn't taking a DNA sample of a seed and predicting that it wouldn't matter where we planted it, that particular seed will likely thrive. We're taking information deduced from an informed investigation of environment and species success and extending this on to make predictions about trees with similar traits planted in similar conditions. Once one starts making claims about the limited success of a tree in a given environmental condition as proof of that tree species' general disadvantaged nature based on a scale we privilege with equating high HighQ scores with positive tree qualities we're into dangerous territory.

Now I would assume someone might argue all Cousin of Murray is doing here is stating we are growing on south facing slopes, so we should stop pretending that pines and firs are on equal footing with oaks and aspen but should instead come to terms with this reality. To which I think we need to come back to the question of if race is actually a "thing" or just shorthand for saying when I see someone with certain physical characteristics I assume they have a particular ethnic background. And much like any of our shorthand ways of doing things, these are loaded concepts with meaningful problems when one attempts to actually use them at any level other than as a form of biased thinking. So these terms we call race seem most useful when looking at the interface of bias and social behaviors towards people so they do have some form of relevance in the social sciences. But when it comes to use them to explain something about a person one might assign to a particular race they fall apart while saying the person making use of them in this way is...well, racist. And Murray and his co-author do just that even if one wants to say they are mainly just commenting on the way things are.

[_honorentheos]

I don't think this does justice to the background for the discussion. It seems to me we're discussing this because Charles Murray is broadly seen as a controversial figure. When he was disruptively protested at Middlebury College last year, Sam Harris became interested in the controversy around him which brought him to read the book The Bell Curve and then invite Murray onto his podcast. Outcry ensued over his apparent endorsement of Murray, and Harris in typical form took on the outcry with relish. EAllusion isn't an individual with a unique perspective on flaws in Murray's position but seems to accurately represent a broader view of The Bell Curve, one that Harris and Murray had spent time deriding extensively in the Waking Up podcast. So, it seems we're engaging in an extension of a much broader discussion that isn't fairly isolated to EAllusion or Sam Harris. And by extension, we are having this discussion because Murray includes controversial conclusions regarding race and IQ in his findings. So. We're talking about this because of race and IQ.

I get the sense that Analytics shares my respect for Sam Harris's way of reasoning (and I imagine Analytics doesn't always agree with him either). So if Sam Harris is going to stake his reputation on how he interpreted the book, I think Analytics likely felt it was worth reading to judge for himself who he thought was right.

I think it's entirely possible that the book reads like a racist screed from a particular perspective without the author intending it to be so. The author may not even have been aware of his own biases when he wrote it (imagine that!). However, I haven't read the book personally, don't intend to (because the subject just isn't that interesting to me), so I don't know how it reads (and I admire Analytics desire to know; especially since I'm not willing to extend the same effort). From what's been quoted of the book in this thread, I think I understand both points of view.

All I know from having listened to/read Harris over the years is that if that guy is a racist, everyone on the planet is a racist. Calling Harris a racist is only done with malicious intent. As for Murray, I have no idea.

I don't think Harris is racist or that most people are saying Harris is racist. I think Harris is prone to enjoy argument for the sake of argument, and has a stubborn and therefore unscientific approach to discussions that does turn more academically minded people off while appealing to people who share his claimed views. This was my view of him when I first read The End of Faith back around 2006 where it was clear he wasn't interested in the experience of people who were religious from their emic perspective. But rather he was capitalizing on the fear of religious extremism in the nuclear age where one radical extremist able to get ahold of the right weapon could level a city. Over time, I felt he has gone from the least informed Four Horsemen to one of the better informed New Atheists who made real efforts to investigate what was going on behind people's need for something transcendent in life. But he has justly earned a reputation as someone who overestimates his own knowledge and understanding. He isn't as rational as one might assume because he claims to be and tends to keep his cool in most discussions. He asserts often where he would be better off caveating and being more tentative. I say that while also saying I actually tend to like him as a public intellectual. But you have to take him in total rather than in part or he'll trip you up. In this case, I think Harris has found the nexus between his (justified, in my opinion) concern over censorship on college campuses when Murray was protested at Middlebury College a year or so ago, and his political/economic libertarianism. This streak has more to do with religion than might appear initially to be the case, but it shares a view of the world with religionists. There is a type of As a Man Thinketh logic involved that says what we observe to be the conditions we observe are self-justifying unless we can point to an explicit unjust cause that has yet to be balanced out by time. Whether it's divine providence or the markets, both are rooted in a view that the deserving get rewarded while those who failed to be rewarded were not deserving.

Anyway, I have had enough discussions with people regarding the New Atheists to get a sense that one can risk skewering a sacred cow when one criticizes one of them in much the same way one can draw fire from a Mormon when one criticizes a general authority. Something to consider when appealing to authority rather than an actual point of discussion.